By Elizabeth Barhydt
On Tuesday, October 8 at 7 p.m., New Canaan High School will hold the first public showing at The Dome. The evening, called An Evening Exploring Our Solar System, will bring townspeople into the school’s reimagined planetarium—now a state-of-the-art, IMAX-style immersive theater. Tickets are $20. Proceeds will help purchase new shows and support classroom programming throughout the year. Doors open at 6:30.
The Dome is the work of years. In May, the Sentinel told how it came to be. Sara Schubert, a graduate and former teacher, remembered her high school astronomy class. “I could go camping, look up at the stars … and feel something,” she said. That memory became a mission. She and a committee raised $350,000 in one year from more than four hundred donors, a sum matched by $500,000 from the town. Together they remade the planetarium into something new.
At its opening, Superintendent Bryan Luizzi spoke of what it means. “To think big, not small,” he said, “by having these shared experiences that we can remember.” His words carried the sense that this project is more than science. It is about community, about wonder, about gathering in one place to see what lies beyond us.
October 8 is an invitation to the whole town. To walk into a darkened theater, lean back, and travel through the solar system without leaving Farm Road. To remember what it is to be astonished.
The Dome was designed with everyone in mind. Elevator access brings visitors to its third-floor perch. Plans envision nursery schools and nursing homes, generations young and old, all coming to sit beneath its stars. Outside the theater, memorial stars and sponsor names line the walls—markers of a town that invested not only in a building but in imagination itself.
The first showing is the start. Each ticket sold helps make possible new programming for students, new evenings of discovery for the town. The Dome is a place built for learning, but also for wonder, and for joy.
There is a certain grace in it. In a noisy time, New Canaan has chosen to build a place where people can sit together, look up, and see something larger, brighter, lasting. It is not nostalgia. It is faith that wonder matters, that imagination has a home here.
On October 8, the doors open. The invitation is simple: come, sit, look up.
